Con: Fewer guides, more complicated setup and having to solve the translation from CUDA with IPEX-LLM and so on. Not everything will run.

Pro: Looking at Intel Arc Pro B70 with 32GB for less than half the price of an RTX 5090 sure makes one curious to try it.

Problem with smaller footprint is cooling and how audible it becomes.
One idea is to use fiber optic hdmi cables and a usb extender to hide the pc away in another room.

If you want smaller footprint then the keyword to use is “Unified memory”, it can be reasonable fast for 30B models and a slow thinker mode for 70B ones.

edit: example of a Unified Memory Apple Mac Studio can be found here at $5499 for 96GB RAM
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-studio/m3-ultra-chip-32-core-cpu-80-core-gpu-96gb-memory-2tb-storage

When it comes to Nvidia GPUs the VRAM is the main thing to look for.
For consumer cards it is:
Entry level - RTX 5060 Ti 16GB RAM with a price point around 500-550 euro
Mid - Buying a used RTX 3090 24GB RAM with a price point around 830 euro when I look at swedish second hand markets
High - RTX 5090 32GB RAM with a price point around 3500 euro

After that you end up looking at the RTX Pro Blackwell cards:
Entry - RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell 48GB RAM ~5300 euro
Mid - RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96GB RAM ~10100 euro

It all depends on which models you want to run, you can definitely start playing around with Llama 3 8B and similar models with a 5060 Ti 16GB.

If you’re looking at 24B-30B models you need the 24GB VRAM that RTX 3090 offers and get a larger context window if you go for the RTX 5090.

If you’re looking to run Llama 3 70B then you need to go into the RTX Pro level of vram.

All of this is based on running it with Nvidia cards, there’s also other setups such as Mac Studios with huge amount of RAM. They’re slower but allow for much larger models at the same price point.
You could also run with AMD/Intel gpus but much software is built primarily for running CUDA (and Nvidia) gpus so it’s more work and not always compatible.

I know you said no “monster rack” but I don’t really know what you classify as a monster. :)
An ordinary gaming pc is also a good starter AI pc, so something like this allows you to do both:
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/sFp4qd

Seeing the tax difference in Sweden and Denmark and then realizing the Danes still rank higher than us in welfare and healthcare reviews…
I don’t wanna learn to speak gibberish but I am a bit envious.

off-topic: Why does every news-site require you to trust at least half a dozen third party domains to even see the interesting parts? Shared the stats here.

When I wanted my current server to be available for more experimental loads I decided I needed a new machine and at that time all hdds had gone up in price, but a package of ds225+ with 2x16TB had not yet been price increased so I got the NAS “for free”.
I would’ve repurposed an old gaming machine otherwise.
Worth looking for those kind of “deals” where someone has forgotten to increase a bundle price.

I imagine going through a “setup your own mail server guide” such as https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/setup-basic-postfix-mail-sever-ubuntu will give you the basics or at least enough to allow you to ask the correct questions to get the answers you want.

It has short explanations of what the different DNS records do (A, MX, PTR, etc) and such woven into the guide.